Dawnkeepers

by Jessica Andersen

  As they passed into the tunnel, lighting their way with powerful hand lamps she’d bought to replace the lame-ass flashlights they’d been using in the tunnels up until now, she looked back and caught Nate staring at her. Granted, she was in front of him, so it wasn’t likely he’d be looking elsewhere. But the intensity in his gaze, and the way his amber eyes locked on hers, let her know that he was looking at her, thinking about her.

  What is it? she wanted to say. Tell me. But she didn’t, because what would be the point? She’d said what she’d needed to say, and he’d done the same. They had, finally, reached the end of their personal debate. As he would say, “Game over.” And this so isn’t what I should be focused on right now, she thought as she faced forward and followed Strike and Leah into the tunnels that ran down to the subterranean river, and eventually to the altar room.

  Yes, Nate was important to her—she was in love with him whether he liked it or not, godsdamn it—but the moment she’d learned how to call the goddess on her own, their relationship had become separate from the needs of the Nightkeepers. And right now the Nightkeepers and their magic had to be her primary concern. So she faced forward and followed the tunnel into the earth, and tried to keep her mind on the connection at the back of her brain, where the rainbows lived.

  As she walked, she prayed for the strength to do what needed to be done, and the smarts to recognize what that might be. There was no ripple in the barrier energy, no sense of the goddess beyond the low thrum of color. Alexis knew she was out there, waiting. But for what?

  “Frigging obscure prophecies,” she heard Nate growl from behind her, his low words amplified and thrown forward by the tunnel walls. “Couldn’t just spell this shit out, could they?”

  Alexis stifled a snort, and immediately felt better. Maybe it was blasphemy—okay, probably—but she couldn’t say he was wrong. What good did it do for them to know they needed to defeat the Volatile if they didn’t know how to find it?

  No doubt Leah had been right when she’d speculated in council that the sheer length of the skyroad, running through the extra four layers of heaven that hell lacked, attenuated the ability of the gods to interact with the earthly plane and compromised their ability to connect with the Nightkeepers. Even Kulkulkan had “spoken” to Leah only a couple of times, during their initial binding. Alexis couldn’t say for sure that Ixchel had ever talked to her in words; the few times she’d thought she’d caught a snippet of thought that didn’t feel like her own could’ve just been wishful thinking. Besides, as Strike had pointed out, the gods created and the demons destroyed, and creation was a much harder energy to push through the barrier than was destruction. Entropy in action, and all that. All of which pretty much left the Nightkeepers floundering with visions and gut instincts, and prophecies left by their ancestors based on . . . well, visions and gut instinct.

  Which just sucks beyond sucking, Alexis thought as she hiked in her queen’s wake. And there she went with the blasphemy again, which probably wasn’t a good thing to be coming from a Godkeeper on one of the cardinal days. But it had already been a long day of waiting, and the silence in the tunnel was getting to her, raising the hairs at her nape and puckering goose bumps on her arms. The empty quiet, broken only by the sound of their breathing and the scuff of boots on the stone, seemed to be waiting for something. Or someone.

  Then Alexis saw Leah glance from one side of the tunnel to the other, and Strike scrub a hand down the back of his neck. Which meant Alexis wasn’t the only one feeling it.

  “Something’s coming,” she whispered as unease shivered through her and took up residence in her gut. “Something bad.”

  “I know,” Nate said. He’d moved up close, so close that she could feel his body heat and his energy. She didn’t reach back to him, but knowing he was there steadied her. Whether or not he was her lover or mate, he was a warrior she could count on. She only hoped he could count on her in return, hoped they all could.

  The air remained tense as they worked their way deeper into the tunnel system. Soon Alexis could hear the drip of water up ahead, signaling that they were near the subterranean river that would lead them to the altar room. They took the narrow pathway beside the waterway, then turned away from the river to the sacred chamber. There was no sign of pursuit or ambush. The only thing menacing them was the heavy feeling in the air, a sense of something watching them, waiting. The grating edginess of it served only to exaggerate the hum of magic in Alexis’s blood as the stars and planets aligned, inching into position in the final thirty-minute countdown to the equinox.

  Then they turned the final corner and came to the arched doorway leading into the altar room. The tunnel widened, allowing Leah to move up and walk at Strike’s side. Nate joined Alexis, and the others paired up behind them, with Michael forming the rear guard alone.

  They went in with their autopistols drawn and fireball magic at the ready, but the chamber was empty. There was no sign of Iago, no sign of anything out of place. Only there was something, Alexis realized as Strike lit the ceremonial torches around the perimeter of the room and the Nightkeepers extinguished their hand lamps, letting the room fall to firelight.

  In that firelight, she could see a shimmer walk all the way across the back wall behind the chac-mool altar.

  Without thinking, she reached for Nate’s hand and tugged him up beside her. “Do you see that?”

  He frowned. “See what?”

  “I’ll take that as a no.” Alexis turned to the others. “Does anyone else—”

  Anna screamed suddenly, cutting her off midquestion. The king’s sister dropped to her knees and grabbed her right forearm in pain. “Lucius, no! Don’t do it! Don’t—” Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she went limp and toppled over onto her side, convulsing.

  “Anna!” Strike bolted to her side and dropped to his knees beside her as she writhed.

  Bowing her body in an arc, she shrieked, “Nooo! Not Jox! Not the winikin! Please!”

  Shock and horror rattled through the Nightkeepers as they realized that the makol must have fully overtaken Lucius and had somehow escaped its warded room and attacked the winikin.

  Panic jolted Alexis, alongside magic and a howl of grief. She grabbed instinctively for Nate’s hand. “Izzy!”

  Strike lunged to his feet, snapping, “Join up!”

  Nate pulled free of her hand and got in the king’s face. “No! You know we can’t go back.”

  And the hell of it was that he was right, Alexis knew. The goddaughter inside her screamed for them to return to Skywatch immediately, yet the warrior in her knew that whatever was going on back there, it wasn’t their main battle. The more important fight was the one that reached for her even now, as the rippling curtain of light darkened and solidified along the back wall of the stone chamber, and she began to see movement behind it, the imprints of huge bodies pressing against what could only be the barrier.

  Strike grated, “Stand aside, Blackhawk. You may not give a shit about anybody but yourself, but I’m not leaving them to die. Rabbit is my responsibility. Jox is mine. They all are.”

  Leah moved up to stand at Strike’s side, her face pale and drawn. “We have to go,” she said. “Skywatch can’t fall a second time.”

  “The Nightkeepers are your priority, and mankind,” Nate insisted, refusing to give way. “Not the winikin or Rabbit. As much as it sucks to say it, the immediate future rests on us and what we do here today.”

  Of them all, Alexis thought she might be the only one to see what it cost Nate to say that, the only one to hear the pain in his voice, see the horror in his too-controlled expression. He glanced at her, a mute plea for some backup against the furious king, and Alexis stepped up to add her voice to his.

  Only her feet didn’t move at first. Then, when they did, they carried her away from the argument, toward the rippling barrier, where she saw colors and darkness battling one another for the upper hand, and achieving only a stalemate. Come, the colors seemed to say.
I need your help.

  “Alexis, what’s wrong?” Nate’s voice held sharp worry, but he sounded suddenly far distant, his tones wavery and indistinct.

  The fabric of the universe dominated her vision, reaching out and drawing her inward. “Call your god,” she said to Strike, only it wasn’t her voice; it was the goddess speaking through her, expending enormous energy to push the message down the skyroad to earth. “The hellroad is open at the city of the clouds. The battle is there.”

  Alexis’s mind was suddenly filled with an image of great, soaring mountains. Bare and snow-covered at their tops, lush and green at their foothills, they wore thick clouds of mist halfway down, where the cold mountain winds met moist tropical air and formed rainy, cool bands of precipitation. High conical mounds speared through the canopy, green-covered and with a hint of square-edged stone here and there. Lost pyramids rising up from the jungle floor.

  Her voice shaking with the effort of the magical contact, which was draining her quickly, Alexis described the scene as best as she could. When she started to sway, she felt a strong arm loop around her waist and knew it was Nate.

  “Strike needs a ground-level image to ’port,” Nate said. “We can’t zap in midair.”

  His voice didn’t seem so far away now, as she leaned into his strength, his warmth, and felt her own energy drain. She was aware of Strike and Leah leaning over Anna, who had gone silent and still, aware of the awful tension in the room as the Nightkeepers awaited the decision. Skywatch or the hellmouth? The battle for home or the battle for the world?

  Strike’s choice was, she realized, very like what his father must have faced in the moment the Banol Kax broke through the intersection and sent their lava creatures to kill the winikin and children back at the training compound. What had happened before was happening again.

  Alexis concentrated, sending her need along the skyroad link, and was rewarded with a second, ground-level picture, one that grew dim and gray as her energy faded. Then there was a rasp and a hiss of pain, and Nate was clasping her hand in his bloodied grasp, boosting her power with his own. The image clarified, one of carved stone and a gaping skull mouth wreathed in gray-white vapor.

  “It’s high in the mountains,” she said, “just below where the clouds begin. There’s a river flowing in and down, and a dark, deep tunnel.” She kept going with the description of the screaming skull and surrounding cloud forest, trying to give her king enough for the ’port link. When she ran down, when there was no more left that she could think to add, she sagged against Nate, feeling his energy as her own, his fatigue as her own.

  With the message passed, the wall behind the altar returned to stone, and Alexis’s Godkeeper connection returned to a baseline shimmer at the back of her skull. The room stopped spinning, and some of her energy returned—thanks, she suspected, to the blood link with Nate.

  Knowing he would need his own strength, she pulled away and forced herself to stand on her own two feet, unswaying, as she faced Strike. “We have to go where the battle is.”

  Expression stony, the king glanced at Nate. “What do you think?”

  “I agree with Alexis.”

  “Fuck.” Strike gestured for the others to link up. “Let’s go.”

  Alexis knew he never would’ve done it based on their say-so, knew that he recognized it as the right course too. But even so, she felt a sharp bite of responsibility, of worry. As the ’port magic revved up around them, she tried not to imagine what was going on back at Skywatch . . . and failed miserably. The stories of the prior massacre were too ingrained in her mind, her worry for Izzy and the others too sharp. So as the world slid sideways and went gray-green, she sent a prayer into the barrier: Gods protect our winikin. They’re the only family we have left.

  The Nightkeepers materialized in the place she’d described to Strike, the vapor-laden air snapping away from them with an audible pop. The atmosphere was thick with the smell of death and decay, but thin with altitude and cold. The clearing they had landed in was lit by torchlight, and Alexis clutched Nate’s hand hard at the sight of the screaming skull mouth and the dark, brackish water leading into the cave system. For a second everything inside her rebelled at the thought of going inside. Then her eyes locked on a glitter of purple and gray, and rebellion went to horror.

  Mistress Truth’s headless body, still garbed in purple velour, was spiked to the wall of the cavern, pointing the way inward, a grisly sacrifice to a brutal pantheon.

  Anna said quietly, “Call home. Please. I did what I could through the blood link, but it wasn’t much.” She was very pale, still rubbing her forearm where the ajawlel mark was clearly paining her, but she’d abided by the king’s decision to follow the battle rather than their hearts.

  “Already on it,” Strike said. He had the satellite phone pressed to his ear, but shook his head and clicked it off with a curse. “Nothing.”

  “Oh, there’s something, all right,” Alexis said, her own voice feeling as if it were coming from far away. She wasn’t sure if that was her talking now, or the goddess. The power conduit felt different somehow, as though it were vibrating on an entirely new frequency. “Listen. Feel.”

  There was a faint whistling noise, almost a high scream, barely audible to human ears. The earth beneath their feet shimmied slightly, the faintest of tremors. The cloud forest around them, dank and ancient and rotten, was silent. The air hummed with a waiting tension.

  Nate said, “I think—”

  A huge, grating crack rent the air, the ground gave a massive heave, nearly throwing Alexis off her feet, and the cave mouth shuddered and started to move. At first she thought it was collapsing. Horror coalesced and built when she saw that it wasn’t collapsing at all; the upper jaw of the screaming skull was hingeing, the scream growing wider as the skull mouth stretched open.

  Then, darkness spewed from the opening. Evil. A gout of foul purple-black smoke came first, followed by an unearthly howl that nearly sent her to her knees. She was barely aware that Nate held her up, that he shielded her with his body as a dark shape hurtled from the hellroad and took flight, flapping its great, leathery wings as it disappeared into the darkness beyond the torchlight. Then another. Another.

  They were bats, she realized with sharp terror. Huge bats, each the size of a subcompact. Three of them, then a fourth, then two more, until all seven of the death bats had flown free of the cave. Camazotz’s sons had been freed by Iago. The powerful altar stone must have overcome Iago’s lack of the obsidian knife that Nate wore in his belt, Alexis thought. Or else they’d been wrong and the Volatile’s knife had never been one of the prophecies; it was something else. But what?

  The death bats screamed as they wheeled up and dived back down aiming for the Nightkeepers, then screamed again when Michael’s shield spell sent them tumbling back.

  “We’re too late,” Nate shouted over the thunder of wings. “Iago breached the barrier!”

  “Not yet,” Alexis shouted, not sure how she knew, but positive she was right. “He’s torn a hole, but it’s fixable. We can weave it shut.”

  It wasn’t until she said the word that she understood its import. Weaving. Rainbows. It wasn’t about fighting the demons with rainbows, never had been. Her job was to repair the barrier. It would be up to the others to fight the bats.

  “Tell Leah to call Kulkulkan,” she gasped, feeling the goddess reach into her and start pulling her into the magic. Or was Ixchel pulling the magic from her? She couldn’t tell, wasn’t sure, wasn’t sure of anything beyond the fact that this was what she’d been born to do; this was her fate and destiny.

  “They’re already on it,” Nate answered. He was bracing her, channeling the magic into her as the bats slammed into Michael’s shield again and again, denting it and threatening to break through. “The others are linked up. Ready for the boost?”

  She nodded, so full of magic already that she thought she might burst with it, so full that she couldn’t talk, couldn’t think, could only cl
ing to him as the Nightkeepers formed the sacred circle, with Strike and Leah using their joined power to channel the golden clarion call that would bring the creator god to earth. Then Nate linked hands with Anna, and Michael reached for Alexis’s free hand, completing the circle and linking their power to hers.

  And for a few seconds, she was a god.

  Power streamed through Alexis, into her, lit her up and sent her higher than she’d ever been. She reached up and touched the sky, stretched down and thrust her roots deep underground. Then the clouds parted overhead, the night went day-bright, and a rainbow speared down, slamming into the ground at her feet and making the earth shudder with its force. This one’s for you, Izzy, Alexis thought, saying a prayer for the only mother she’d ever really known.

  And, finally understanding what she had to do, she pulled away from Nate and stepped into the rainbow.

  She heard him shout her name, but couldn’t answer. Pain speared through her, followed by exhilaration and the sense of moving, accelerating, shooting up into the air. She had a moment of free fall in reverse as she traveled up the rainbow, up the column of light to a place in the sky where there was a huge, gaping split. Only it wasn’t the sky that was split, she saw once she reached it. It was the barrier. She could look through the tear and see the other side, straight into hell. There she saw lava-orange boluntiku and the green-eyed shadows of makol without their human shells. Behind them were black, blank shapes of unimaginable evil, Banol Kax, surrounded by their lesser demons, the armies of hell, gathered together on a wide, gray-black plain that was somehow on the same level as the earth’s atmosphere.

  The creatures strained toward her, toward earth, held back only by the barrier, which was unraveling strand by strand as she watched.

  And there, as she hung within the rainbow itself, Alexis heard Ixchel’s voice, faint with distance. She couldn’t make out the words, but she understood.